1. Area of the Art
The present invention is in the area of oral medicaments and more specifically an aid to facilitate the swallowing of solid medicaments.
2. Description of the Background Art
Overview of need: The inability to move a dosage of medication completely through the mouth, palate and down esophagus to the stomach is a significant problem for most children, a large percentage of geriatric patients and a surprisingly high percentage of the general population. This is also a problem with ingestion of products for veterinary care. Obviously, if a patient is unable to swallow medicine or finds swallowing to be very uncomfortable, there is a significant likelihood that patient will “forget” to take the medicine with often serious medical consequences.
There are both a physiological and a psychological aspects to the problem. Although the process of swallowing is actually quite complex involving coordinated peristalsis of the muscles of the esophagus, the process is almost entirely automatic. However, various neurological deficits can make proper swallowing difficult. In such cases the patient may benefit from something that eases the swallowing process. Difficulty in swallowing may result in an uncomfortable feeling that something is stuck in the throat or chest. This may also involve an inability or difficulty in breathing and a resulting choking or gagging reflex. Certainly, there is almost nothing more frightening than an inability to breathe. As a result people who have had any difficulties in swallowing may develop such fear or anxiety that the natural swallowing process is compromised. Thus, a fear of swallowing difficulties may provoke actual swallowing difficulties. A treatment that eases swallowing will benefit such individuals in at least two ways. First, they will actually be able to swallow needed medicaments. Second, after repeated instances of successful swallowing, their anxiety about swallowing will abate and they will continue to enjoy improved swallowing ability.
Physicians often provide a number of tips concerning swallowing including chewing one's food thoroughly and ingesting foods that are largely liquid. This advice, however, does little to help with swallowing solid medicaments. One can hardly chew a pill thoroughly, and although a pill can be powdered, this may alter the proper uptake of the drug and will often result in a truly foul tasting mixture—something that causes a patient to be even less likely to take medications as prescribed. In many cases drugs can be compounded in a liquid form, but with a significant number of pharmaceuticals a liquid dosage is either not possible or at least not practical. Although pharmacists can make up a liquid form of many solid drugs, in a number of cases the liquid dosages are significantly less stable than the solid drug. Often the patient is required to refrigerate the liquid drug solution, and even then full stability and activity is not assured.
This problem is known in the art and a number of attempts have been made to solve it. One popular approach has been to develop coatings for pills and other solid medicaments that facilitate swallowing. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,863,741 to Becker describes an enteric coating that facilitates swallowing. U.S. Patent Application No. 2005/0025825 to Heasley et al. describes another coating intended to improve swallowing. Another approach used in the art has been to modify the tried and true method of taking a drink of water to help with swallowing. There are a number of disclosures which modify the viscosity of the liquid used to aid in swallowing. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,277,395 to Fukui et al. which discloses a somewhat viscous drink that apparently helps hold the esophagus open during the swallowing process. However, it does not appear that the art has used a thin liquid coating containing viscosity-adhesion-lubricity agents as opposed to a modified liquid that fills the esophagus around the medicament.